Albert Oehlen: “Big paintings by me with small paintings by others”

This book was published on the occasion of Albert Oehlen: “Grandi quadri miei con piccoli quadri di altri” at Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, Switzerland. The exhibition, whose title translates to “Big paintings by me with small paintings by others,” explored Oehlen’s practice as an artist alongside his activities as a collector, juxtaposing his own large-scale abstract canvases with smaller works by a range of other artists.

The book documents the curatorial dialogue that Oehlen undertook with Francesca Benini and Christian Dominguez in preparing the exhibition, helping to establish formal, thematic, and conceptual links between his work and those of a long and diverse list of painters and sculptors that includes Richard Artschwager, Hans Bellmer, Duane Hanson, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, and Christina Ramberg, among others. It reproduces the works in the exhibition and contains a preface by Tobia Bezzola, essays by Benini and Dominguez, and a concluding section of biographical notes on the thirty-four featured artists.